It Happened Last Week

Mean Streets

By Mark Adams
Published Mar 4, 2007

Was it any coincidence that three days after Martin Scorsese finally took home his Academy Award for Best Director, Wall Street’s Raging Bull suddenly stumbled? Probably, but then Scorsesesque plot twists abounded this week. A couple of GoodFellas, sons of made man Joe Colombo, were cleared of federal charges of extortion and racketeering. A judge ruled that an 1851 law limiting the city’s damages in the Staten Island Ferry crash was the stupidest nineteenth-century cap he’d seen since Gangs of New York. Hillary Clinton’s staff dropped its usual Travis Bickle–ish “You talkin’ to me?” stance when asked why she’d five times neglected to mention a family charity on her Senate ethics forms, instead admitting that one of these days she had to get herself organizized. The Color of Money beckoned her fellow Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards to Murray Hill, hat in hand, to tell New York Stories and apologize for his Iraq-war vote. Cape-wearing cardinal Edward Egan struck Fear into the hearts of condemned-church squatters, urging them to come out, come out wherever they were. Unwitting Queen of Comedy Foxy Brown showed Rupert Pupkin–like delusion over battery charges, telling reporters that she was “doing excellent in anger management.” Rats scurrying through a Greenwich Village KFC/Taco Bell provided stomach-turning footage to rival the Joe Pesci–Sharon Stone sex scene in Casino, though, thankfully, they don’t live there anymore. After Hours, Al Sharpton pondered his possible blood ties to segregationist Strom Thurmond’s family’s slaves. Cops posing as porn auteurs in Queens busted a guy selling Bob the Builder costumes to Method actors well past the Age of Innocence. Even Scorsese’s fellow bigshot directors got in the act: There was James Cameron’s Last Temptation to drag Christ’s putative bones to the New York Public Library. (“This is absolutely not a publicity stunt,” he vowed.) Meanwhile, a judge allowed Steven Soderbergh to be among the Departed from a jury pool. And a parking survey confirmed that searching for a spot in Park Slope can drag on longer than the second half of The Aviator.